Within the motion picture, television, and internet media industries, product placement is a vital and successful form of advertising. Product placement typically involves placing a product name, product logo, or a product itself within a scene in a movie, television show, or other video content. This placement is done in such a way that it can be viewed by the viewer of the media content. Often, there is minimal or no interference with the rest of the video content, including any artistic or creative intent, unless merging the product placement with the artistic or creative intent is a deliberate choice of the parties involved.
Typically, product placement involves an advertiser, who provides the media asset or assets involved in the product placement and agrees to its product being placed in one or more scenes of the media content; and the publisher, who provides the media content and/or the platform for the media content, and agrees to the advertiser's product being placed within the media content.
Internet media advertisers and publishers commonly use so-called “ad exchanges”, which are online, digital marketplaces for advertisers and publishers to buy and sell online advertisement space, often through real-time auctions or other such systems and mechanisms. This greatly simplifies and standardizes many aspects of online advertising, greatly reducing the time, energy, and financial resources involved in working out an individualized, negotiated agreement from the beginning between an advertiser and a publisher each time an advertiser wishes to purchase advertising space. In the case of product placement within one or more scenes of streaming video content, however, there is no similar programmatic way to facilitate the transaction and execution of placing a product or object into a video stream.